Abstract

Recent writing on hominoid images from Flores Island reveals local conceptions of creatures, now mostly regarded as extinct, which seem zoologically realistic, or natural rather than supernatural. Drawing partly on narratives from the Rajong district recorded by J.A.J. Verheijen, this article explores an attribute that adds to this realism, and hence the putative creatures' empirical plausibility: their consumption of wood charcoal partly in conjunction with eggplants, both of which are claimed to have been regularly stolen in the past from human settlements. Reviewing the evidence for charcoal ingestion by animals and humans in various parts of the world, including Flores, it is shown how this dietary practice can counter toxic effects of various plant foods, including raw eggplant and wild tubers, another, implicit component of the hominoids' diet. It is further suggested that this sort of behaviour and local representations more generally of reputedly recently extant hominoids, as well as the interactions with Homo sapiens which these entail, should be taken into account in future anthropological research into the new hominin chrono-species Homo floresiensis, discovered on Flores in 2003.

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